Autonomous vehicles (i.e. self-driving vehicles) are currently being developed that have the ability to convey passengers over public streets to their desired destination without passenger intervention. The development path for these vehicles relies on three key factors: safety, reliability, and comfort.
Unlike safety and reliability, comfort is a subjective factor. Each passenger may define comfort in a different way. Passenger comfort may be influenced by various factors such as vehicle speed, vehicle acceleration, and distance between other vehicles.
Self-learning vehicles conventionally rely on a driver initially driving the vehicle while the self-learning system in the vehicle learns the driver's style of driving from a set of training data from the driver's demonstration. The self-learning system may then later replicate this particular driver's style of driving.
However, such methods depend on the amount of information embedded in the training data and may not work well for situations not covered by the training data. Furthermore, some vehicles (e.g., rental vehicles) are not available to be initially driven by an individual. Other vehicles (e.g., fully autonomous vehicles) may lack the controls (e.g., steering wheel, accelerator/brake pedals) to be driven by an individual.